Fresh off a positive earnings call that saw Cisco report $11.9 billion in revenue for the 2Q 2018 — a 3 percent increase from the same quarter in 2017 and the first time in 6 quarters the company reported year-over-year sales increases — CEO Chuck Robbins has a lot to crow about.

First of all, the company's most strategic new direction: The Network. Intuitive, more commonly known as intent-based networking is rapidly finding acceptance amongst customers, Robbins said.

Extreme Network’s recent string of acquisitions – including it’s recent $100 million auction-buy of Avaya’s networking business, it’s purchase of Brocade’s Ethernet IP networking assets and its purchase of wireless vendor Zebra Technologies last year – should cause enterprise end users to potentially rethink their network infrastructure buying decisions when it comes time for their next hardware refresh, according to Forrester analyst Andre Kindness.

Kindness says in the immediate short term, there are not likely to be any major changes to offerings from these vendors; all current Avaya and Brocade networking gear will still be supported. But given Extreme’s acquisition spree, it’s expected there will be some consolidation and blending of products over the medium and long-term. “As with anything, it will take some time to reconcile the moves and figure out the new direction,” says Kindness.

Cisco said it would target collaboration applications first with artificial intelligence technology it will get from buying MindMeld for $125 million.

The deal, announced today, is Cisco’s third in two weeks and nets the company MindMeld’s AI platform which lets customers to build intelligent, conversational interfaces for any application or device with its proprietary machine learning (ML) technology. Specifically, MindMeld develops what it calls Deep-Domain Conversational AI which essentially allows customers to embed voice commands in any applications and services.

Verizon this week said it would begin offering x86-based servers with OpenStack software aimed at customers looking to support all manner of advanced cloud, software defined networking and network functions virtualization-based enterprises.

According to Verizon, letting customers use a combination of off the shelf hardware over a distributed deployment of OpenStack will let them decouple hardware from software and frees them from proprietary hardware. OpenStack is developed by some 150 companies from AT&T to IBM and Red Hat to Cisco, Dell EMC and others. The open software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center, managed typically through a single dashboard.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) this week said the plague it calls the Business Email Compromise continues to rack-up victims and money – over 40,000 worldwide victims and $5 billion in the latest count.

The BEC scam is typically carried out by compromising legitimate business e-mail accounts through social engineering or computer intrusion to conduct unauthorized transfers of funds, the IC3 stated. Most victims report using wire transfers as a common method of transferring funds for business purposes; however, some victims report using checks as a common method of payment. The fraudsters will use the method most commonly associated with their victim’s normal business practices. The scam has evolved to include the compromising of legitimate business e-mail accounts and requesting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Wage and Tax Statement (W-2) forms for employees, and may not always be associated with a request for transfer of funds, the IC3 stated.

NASA is looking to bolster the speed – from ten to 10,000 times -- of the software on its Pleiades supercomputer and is issuing a public challenge to get the job done.

The catch is that the software the space agency is looking to squeeze all of that performance out of is based on Fortran – a program that has roots back to 1954.

“This is the ultimate ‘geek’ dream assignment,” said Doug Rohn, director of NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program (TACP) in a statement.

According to IBM: “From its creation in 1954, and its commercial release in 1957 as the progenitor of software, Fortran (FORMula TRANslator) became the first computer language standard, ‘helped open the door to modern computing,’ and may well be the most influential software product in history. Fortran liberated computers from the exclusive realm of programmers and opened them to nearly everybody else. It is still in use more than 50 years after its creation.

The legal ping-pong battle between Cisco and Arista Thursday found Cisco on the winning side as In the International Trade Commission ruled that Arista switches infringe on two core Cisco patents that the company says are key technologies in its network switching pantheon.

The technology issues involved in supporting about 27 distinct DHS information systems and databases hinder the effort by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to track people who overstay their visas.

In detailing its third quarter 2017 financials Extreme CEO Ed Meyercord said the company was “locked and loaded” as it worked toward combining and integrating the two companies – Avaya and Brocade -- it is in the process of purchasing.

Extreme has a lot of work ahead as it combines Brocade's data center business and the network technology of Avaya Holdings – which is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy – both of which it said it would acquire in March. Extreme added that it has now integrated another buy it made, Zebra wireless with great success. Extreme said that in the third quarter alone four of its top 10 deals came from the Zebra side.

Saggezza is a privately held company founded in 2006. The name Saggezza derives from the Latin word for wisdom, or insight, according to the company’s website. It’s products, TruVantage – aimed at financial institutions and Lube Insights – a cloud-based application offer data analytics support for IT operations, visualization applications and business process optimization.

Cisco today warned user of a critical vulnerability in its CVR100W Wireless-N VPN router execute that could let an attacker issues arbitrary code or cause a denial of service situation.

The company also issues three “High” level impact warnings advisories on its IOS XR Software, Teleprescence and Aironet wireless access point products.

On the Critical warning, Cisco said a vulnerability in the Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP) implementation in the Cisco CVR100W Wireless-N VPN Router could let an unauthenticated, Layer 2–adjacent attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (DoS).

Cisco has padded its SD-WAN portfolio with fellow player Viptela for $610 million.

The deal will be a homecoming for Viptela’s top execs as current CEO Praveen Akkiraju is a former Cisco and Dell EMC. Co-founders of Viptela Amir Khan and Khalid Raza were engineers at Cisco.

“Cisco has been providing SD-WAN technology and services to customers for several years; the Cisco IWAN solution delivers an on-premises SD-WAN solution for customers needing advanced routing features and other advanced network services, and Cisco Meraki provides a cloud-based solution for customers needing maximum simplicity and unified threat management functionality in their SD-WAN solution. Acquiring Viptela will enable us to expand our portfolio, with increased functionality delivered through the cloud,” wrote Rob Salvagno Vice President of Corporate Business Development at Cisco wrote in a blog post on the deal.